It has been quiet around Carune for a while now, but I'd like to take a moment and announce that we are back from hiatus!
Unfortunately due to certain events in our private lives we had to take a break from Carune, but we are back stronger and more driven than ever!

We have been working on Carune for quite a few years now, using the Neo Axis engine, however, due to poor support for the engine, we have had a meeting with our key people and came to the decision to switch to another engine.

With these changes, we also re-evaluated the look, feel and vision of Carune, to make it more fitting in modern day MMORPG world.

With the simplicity of developing in our new engine, we expect to make more changes in a smaller timeframe, and we hope to be able to showcase some more awesome graphics soon!

We are truly grateful for all your support over the years, and we are looking forward to a bright future, full of new, awesome showcases of Carune!

At last i can add something here. It has been alot of testings and many issues to overcome before i could show anything at all from the new world (Map). Old and new models needed to be ported to the new map and placed and with that, a lot of adjustments, settings and thousand other small thing to take care of etc...

but anyway, here is the result of that. 10 new screens has been added.

(Right now we are working on the game mecanics, but as soon as we have something to show we will ofc put that up.)

I am going to give you a small update on what we are working on, but first I would like to bring to your attention several things. As some of you have probably noticed, we are changing a lot of things:

Carune is no longer your typical MMO, hobby project of a group of ex MMO players.

The team has been shortened significantly, tighter control, faster decisions, clear chain of command.

A moment of honesty, realistically how much can a small group of 2-3 programmers and 2 world builders can do to create a full blown MMO that had no clear vision.

Carune is now oversimplified, simple fighting mechanisms based on correct combination of skills, focus on dynamic world mechanics, priority in AI companions, open world full of secrets and dungeons for you to explore and the ability to build your own legacy together with your friends instead of flashy skills, moves, static content and other things games such as WoW has to offer.

Our new concept will be revealed later (probably together with a trailer).

The above statements will probably give you a hint on where this project is heading.

Luckily for us when we started becoming active in this project we found out that the engine that we used before has resolved one of the biggest technical obstacles we ever had, which is landscape paging, this feature allows us to create massive landscapes which are paged and loaded as parts. Imagine a landscape that requires you more than several days to explore, we can't wait to show you what MVM is doing right now! Another thing that is worth noting is that I am currently developing an Online World Editor, which will allow us to build the world of Carune in real time - directly on a running game server. One of the features i am also working in parallel with everything else is : dynamic scene Occlusion Culling, a very important optimization that will help the players suffer as less FPS loss as possible. At the moment we have a working CPU OCC solution based on Intel's demo even though its a bit troublesome to import into NeoAxis. Hopefully, the procedure of importing this OCC solution will be finished soon, even though we have other priorities (re-write servers to allow this new world editor). Speaking of servers, we are using a TCP based protocol developed by me 1 year ago, which allows the deployment of servers with only a few lines of code. Another very interesting thing is the new Ogre3d version (2.1) i cannot wait for it to be finished, OpenGL 3+ rendering will be a huge leap forward, performance-wise. Even though I do not expect it to be imported into NeoAxis until the end of the summer.

I have tried to keep the details out in order to provide you with a summary of some of the things that we are currently considering as well as some general implementation information. More technical as well as visual (graphics, art, map, towns, etc) devlogs will follow.